What separates high performers who burn out from leaders who build lasting influence? In this episode of the Leading Visionaries, host Anjel B. Hartwell sits down with Dr. Lizette Warner, scientist and Chief Coaching Officer of Trust & Leadership, to unpack the neuroscience behind grounded leadership.

This episode is essential listening for leaders who want influence without burnout, performance without dysregulation, and growth that is both measurable and sustainable.

What You Will Learn:

Why curiosity is the foundation of visionary leadership.

How trust is built through vulnerability and emotional safety.

Why leadership styles must be used situationally rather than rigidly.

How emotional regulation directly impacts team performance and culture.

Why leaders set the emotional tone of every room they enter.

How nervous system wiring influences conflict, perception, and decision-making.

What measurable diagnostics reveal about leadership blind spots.

How high achievers can prevent burnout, anxiety, and stress-related illness.

How to transition from corporate leadership to entrepreneurship strategically and intentionally.

Why measurable leadership growth can compress six months of development into 30 days.

FAQ:

Why is trust important for effective leadership?

Trust creates psychological safety, and psychological safety allows teams to take risks, share ideas, and perform at higher levels without fear of judgment or punishment.

Can leadership growth really be measured?

Leadership growth can be measured through diagnostics that assess emotional flexibility, stress responses, emotional intelligence patterns, and behavioral tendencies, allowing for targeted and accelerated development.

What causes high performers to burn out?

High performers often experience burnout when chronic stress, nervous system dysregulation, and overextension are not addressed, leading to emotional exhaustion, reduced performance, and sometimes physical illness.

Resource:

Dr. Lizette Warner

Trust and Leadership

Leading Visionaries Podcast

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Now here's your host, Anjel b Hartwell.

Anjel: Welcome to another episode of the Leading Visionaries Podcast, where we celebrate the ingenious, insightful, innovative, and inspired leading visionaries of our time, and provide our listeners with world class examples. Of the kind of courage, clarity, and confidence it takes to bring visions into reality.

Her core belief, the leaders who change the world aren't the loudest. They're the most grounded. Lizette's background spans healthcare research and developing high performing professionals to be promotion ready with clarity and presence. On this interview, she will be sharing the patterns, blind spots, and breakthroughs that drive leadership transformation so that you can rise through the noise and lead at your highest level.

Welcome to the show, Dr. Lizette.

Lizette: Thank you, Anjel. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me.

So I'd love to have your you know, kind of your experience with vision. Were you visionary as a child or was that something that happened along the way?

Lizette: I think for me it's something that happened along the way. I, I feel like I was a bit more tactile as a child. I would break things apart. I remember, I dunno if you remember those old thermos that had, they had mercury inside.

I remember taking, taking one completely apart, right? Very tactile. Had no strategy there at all. I was cu, I had curiosity. I wanted to see how does this thing work? And so I took it apart and I remember gazing at it. I was holding it by the neck after I had taken all the foam off, I had taken the insulate, everything was off of it.

So yeah, so I would say I was not really strategic as a kid, but I was very curious. Scientific,

Anjel: though. Scientific.

Lizette: I was very scientific. I was, yeah. I wanted to understand how did this work? I always had this curiosity, how does this work? And then it wasn't until later where I feel like I started to get more visionary, more strategic.

What do you have on your, what do you have on your feet? You know? Did you unplug the electrical thing before you mess with it? Right? So. Part of it maybe is from experience, but yeah, I, I, I was not strategic as a child, I don't think.

Anjel: Well, but curiosity, right? Curiosity is a huge element of leadership, I think as well.

Yeah. So. Let's talk now about your leadership journey. Were you the little girl who lined up all your, you know, animals in a row and, and was, you know, encouraging them or, you know, cheering them on or your classmates or, you know, girl scouts or something like that? Mm-hmm. Like where did leadership, uh, where did your leadership journey start?

But looking back now, knowing that I have this end-to-end vision, I remember looking at things that had problems or even financial things. I remember my parents arguing about, you know, finances and money and me putting things together, right? Not just looking at, again, little Lizette as very tactical, but starting to piece things together.

You know, the someone barking orders, you know, doing this or that. Yeah.

Anjel: Right. Yeah. Well, there are lots and lots of leadership styles. Mm-hmm. There's leading from behind. There's leading from within, there's leading up, there's leading down, there's authoritarian, there's all kinds. But you know, generally when we are thinking, when we're little, like the, the game is follow the leader, right?

It's like everybody gets lined up and gets behind the leader. So. Let's talk about how you feel trust is an ingredient in getting people to follow the leader.

I mean, I was, you know, looking at some research and if you ever notice, even when you're online on social media, the media that speaks to people is typically. Something where someone's sharing something vulnerably and then all of a sudden there's this, there's this human connection, right? Because we're human and we can connect on that level, but the person who always shares, there's nothing ever wrong.

So that's kind of my, my take on that and where trust falls in, in there.

Anjel: Beautiful. So, you know, we're, we're at a time where I feel. We are and have been probably for the last maybe four or five decades evolving out of command and control leadership and becoming more collaborative collectively.

So I'd love to hear your thoughts about whether or not you see. Regression or you see progression towards more collaborative and human connection based leadership.

Lizette: Yeah, I think there's, it. Maybe it just depends on where, where you are or your organization. I, and what you had said earlier is, is totally valid.

Different personalities have different leadership styles, different situations call for different types of leadership characteristics. There is a place for an authoritative leadership style. Does it need to be every, everywhere, every place? No, but it certainly does have a, it certainly has a place. Is there a place for collaborative leadership?

But it's slower for the process of making sure that we're accurate, making sure that the quality is good. And the, you know, just as well as there are authoritative moments that you need in leadership, right? If there's an emergency, you need to get people out of the building. So there is a, a time and a space for that.

Anjel: Mm. I love the nuance of that response. Really beautiful. And it speaks to this idea of emotional regulation. Mm-hmm. And, you know, obviously your work is about em, emotional regulation with, with leaders. Mm-hmm. There needs to also be some kind of emotional regulation with the, the followers. Mm-hmm. You know, the people that are being led.

So can you speak just a little bit about your perspective on emotional regulation?

They're, they're the ones who are most grounded. Is because when you are a leader, not only are you setting that example for other people to follow you, you are setting the emotional regulation in the room. So we as humans regulate to each other and anyone who has ever been in a relationship, you, you walk in and you begin to reregulate.

You co-regulate. So oftentimes I have clients who will come to my coaching sessions and, and I coach a lot online. Sometimes I coach in person. But oftentimes that person will, will leave and they will often comment, wow, I feel so calm. And, you know, because that's what I bring into the coaching space. I can't help it.

What happens? Almost invariably what happens is the room starts to regulate to that leader. We can't finish our sentences. We're everyone, it, it's like an infection, right? Everyone is Now this chaos has spread through the room. Well, the same thing happens when you're emotionally regulated. When you're regulated, you can transmit that to the rest of the room.

And there's this beautiful example of a. Pilot. It was a, a BA pilot and they, they were on a flight, I can't remember where, it was somewhere over Asia, and they had flown over a space where there was a volcanic eruption, so there was ash in the air, and one of the engines gives out, another engine gives out.

Anjel: Mm-hmm.

Lizette: Cut to the chase. What ended up happening is, is the, the ash solidified it crystallized, and then once they dropped to a a level, he was able to restart some of the engines so everyone was safe. But the point is. Everyone on the plane regulated to the captain.

Anjel: Mm, yeah. Beautiful. I love it. Well, we're gonna take a quick break.

Which is why we've created the Creative Age Leader Lab. Discover more about this opportunity@leadingvisionariespodcast.com slash Creative Age Leader Lab, or click the connect with Anjel button on the website to apply and qualify for consultation for more personalized access and support. Be sure to share this show in your own spirals of influence with the people who you think might benefit from our content.

I wanna say a huge thank you to all of our listeners who are downloading, rating and reviewing. We're welcoming thousands of downloads from all over the world. I wanna shout out this week to our listeners in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, uh, which is where Dr. Lizette is from, as well as our listeners in Singapore and Antigua and Barbuda, and we will be right back with Dr.

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Anjel: And we are back with Dr. Lizette. You can find out more about her@trustandleadership.com. You can go to trust and leadership.com and we will have that for you in the show notes. So before we went to the break, we were talking about emotional regulation. One of the things that I'm curious about because you are, you know, you are now doing your own business, right?

What was that process like and what were some of the leadership principles that you applied in that process?

Lizette: Yeah, so when I was starting my own business, I was doing that concurrently with working at the same time. And a lot of people do that. A lot of entrepreneurs start up their kind of side business while they're working.

Totally valid, totally valid way to approach it. But anyway, that's the way I approached it. Mostly because I had a family. I still have a family, but I was supporting a family, and so I couldn't simply just step away and start my own thing. So I started it doing little by little, just building things up, getting a business plan together, who was I gonna serve?

If you're in that situation, you also have the benefit of being able to invest into your business. So the things that I couldn't do, maybe I hired someone to do for me so that I could be very intentional and strategic about where I was gonna spend the time that I did have on my business to build it up.

I did a lot of competitive intel. I would arrange key opinion leader meetings and we kind of did skunk work, so we would, we would invent products and I was very, very much in the middle of legal, regulatory, marketing, business development, all of those things. So when I started my own business, I didn't realize.

And, and that's not my, you know, that's not my focus, but. That that's when I started realizing, oh, actually I have a lot of skills from corporate. So that's a lot of what I brought with me. I also brought a lot of bad habits, to be honest.

Anjel: Mm-hmm.

Lizette: Right. I brought, brought a lot of bad habits where I was focusing a lot of my time and attention.

I was very focused on building my business, but not so much focused on my own health and my own wellbeing.

Anjel: Mm-hmm.

Lizette: And so that was something that I brought over and it's something that I've now corrected. Hmm. But that was something that, that I brought over. 'cause I had ended up getting diagnosed with an autoimmune disease, which is not uncommon for people who are emotionally dysregulated, it leads to disease.

They don't suffer from burnout, but yet they have acute stress, right? They're chased by lions. Their heart rate goes through the roof. Their adrenaline, their cortisol spikes, but what happens to them is when they go home to their. To the Savannah

Anjel: Zebra pack. To the zebra pack,

Lizette: yeah. Yeah. When they go back to their zebra pack, they aren't reliving the moment.

Anjel: Mm-hmm.

Lizette: They're not experiencing it all over again. They're not opening up email and then their body's getting a shot of cortisol and so that's the, a lot of the work that I do right, is, is to separate that and help people regulate so that we can avoid. Things that happen, like burnout, anxiety, mm-hmm.

Um, disease.

When you're starting your own thing, when you're innovating, when you are bringing something new to the world, you're going to be investing and then the internal work, right? Which was really actually an essential thing to do. And unfortunately, I think when you are trying to split yourself between. One thing and another that can actually aggravate the dysregulation even more.

Lizette: Yeah.

Lizette: You know, one of my favorites is I worked with a client and they hired, they hired us because they, they already had someone they were working with.

But when I explained, you know, what we do, it's very measurable. We take our clients, we're able to essentially give them a plan, a development plan within their first 60 days of working with us. And actually probably within 30, but they already had someone they were working with, but because we were measurable, we were able to give a plan already ahead of time.

They came back and said, I've been working with someone for over a year, and this is exactly what I've needed. And so what we do, and it, and that's one of my favorite stories to tell people because we often say within, within our walls that we're able to give someone a plan and eliminate six months of working with them.

We're able to cut the time that before they start getting results because we're able to identify exactly what's going on and what we need to address.

Anjel: Beautiful.

Lizette: And then they can start making progress. Yeah.

Anjel: Yeah. Beautiful. So who are your favorite types of clients? Are you working mostly with small business owners or big corporations or people who are in startup phase?

Lizette: Yeah. It's, it's a mix of folks, but what they all have in common is they're all high performers. They're high achievers, right. They. Want to do so much. And we work with athletes as well as execs and founders, people who are, have that drive and they, they're, they, they have that drive and that energy, but there's something that's either getting in their way and typically it has something to do with the nervous system, you know, as, as we discover, but.

Mm.

Anjel: Yeah.

Lizette: Yeah.

Anjel: Well, last question, when you say measurable, because you're engineering, measurable, lasting leadership growth, like what is one measurement

Lizette: Yeah.

Anjel: That you provide?

Lizette: Yeah, good question. So there is a particular, as assess, there's few assessments that we use, but one of them it is, and this is where a lot of the measures come from.

We're able to measure things like someone's emotional flexibility. Their emotional, um, intelligence, how their nervous system is wired to react. And that's one of those things that tells us immediately, you know, does someone need to need to work on being able to read emotions and what types of emotions?

Anjel: Mm-hmm.

Lizette: And your nervous system is on edge. Right. And, and that shouldn't trigger us. Really, the only thing that should trigger us is fear and fear alone.

Mm-hmm. But many of us are wired. In ways that we've learned or our nervous system has learned to be on edge when we see sad or angry or happy or neutral.

Anjel: Yeah,

Lizette: neutral is another one.

Anjel: All right. Well, we are at the end, so thank you so much. I appreciate your time here with me today. And listeners, we do love feedback.

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